Quality over quantity makes a marriage

“Would have been” can bring such sorrow, such immense feelings of unfairness, to be quite honest.

My parents deserved 57 years.

They married young. My father, from the rival town 8 miles at the opposite end of a winding, stomach-turning country road, saw my mother from across the high school gymnasium. He was a senior; she wasn’t even close.

My father didn’t know that, not at first. He ventured to the opposing bleachers to say hello.

“Hello,” said my shy but tall and slender mother. She appeared older than she was. She was at a high school basketball game, right? He didn’t know she was at the game because her father was a teacher, deemed the hardest one at the school.

He didn’t ask how old; she didn’t tell him because he didn’t ask, my mother would maintain for decades.

“He should have asked.”

When he did learn that she was way too young, he bolted. In fact, he joined the military.

He’d forget about the tall, slender girl from the town down the road. He saw the world, so to speak, and would come home to visit. He’d seen her through the years and watched her grow up. His younger siblings – he was the seventh of 10 – were friends with her.

He couldn’t miss her. And yet, he did. He missed her more each year.

“I’ll marry you when I turn 18,” she said, when he asked. They married three weeks after her birthday. He was 22.

They spent their honeymoon in a new home, my father’s idea. She wanted to see the world – outside her little town. He thought spending their first night together where no one else had ever slept, in their own home, would be romantic.

He would take her on numerous “honeymoons” to make up for that. The Great Smokey Mountains would be her favorite.

He made her laugh. He adored her. If he found himself within arm’s reach of her, his fingers would be caressing her neck or his hand on the small of her back. She’d run her fingers through his mound of curly hair.

They hated spending a night apart. There was no such thing as sleeping with Mommy and Daddy in those days. That was their time.

They held hands for decades.

A child notices these things. This child remembers the good, can’t recall the bad.

My father died 24 years ago, after rounds of cancer treatments failed to make a dent in his tumors. When he called to tell me the fight was over, I could hear her wailing in the background.

A child remembers those things.

She has faced widowhood with grace, strength and an increasing independence. She line-dances several times a week, plays cards and sees the world. She exercises so regularly, my mother is about the size she was in high school, when he first saw her across that gymnasium.

The woman who once never pumped her own gas faces the world head on, alone. Not lonely, she will say.

I see older couples, holding hands, sitting on park benches, sharing ice cream, and I think: That should be them. My parents deserved this. They should be growing old together.

What started on June 4, 1960, should still be going, should still be setting the gold standard for my own marriage.

That’s not how it was meant to be, my mother will say. They had 33 years.